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Persistent Vigilance and Racial Longing in Choi’s Person of Interest and Kim’s The Interpreter

Persistent Vigilance and Racial Longing in Choi’s Person of Interest and Kim’s The Interpreter

Monica Chiu

Publisher:

University of Hawai'i Press

DOI:10.21313/hawaii/9780824838423.003.0004

This chapter examines the often sobering experiences of surveillance shadowing nonwhite subjects by reading two detective novels: Susan Choi's Person of Interest and Suki Kim's The Interpreter. In both novels, the protagonists are reserved and unobtrusive Asian North Americans who unravel the crimes circumscribing their lives in the racial melancholy of the nation. The chapter first establishes the protagonists' depressed condition as racial melancholia and considers how they embody the effects of persistent vigilance by internalizing scrutiny performed by the dominant community, generating emotional turmoil. It then discusses the pronounced psychological yearning related to the racial visibility and categorization of the protagonists. It also explores the representational idiom of the inscrutable Asian—the paradoxical position of being looked at and overlooked—through a critique of Kandice Chuh's “subjectless” Asian American.

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PRINTED FROM HAWAII SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hawaii.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hawaii University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 November 2018